Sunday, February 16, 2014

Looking for Technical Help Moving Forward

Are you a web content management guru (or guru-in-training)? Ever wanted to lend a hand to Built St. Louis, but didn't know how? Here's your chance!

Built St. Louis has always been a hand-tagged site - that means that I typed in, or copy-pasted, every scrap of HTML and CSS on every page. When I brought the site into its current format back in 1999, that was the only way to do it. It wasn't such a problem back then. Now, however, with approximately 1,200 pages and several dozen tours, it has become extremely unwieldy, to the point that it inhibits my ability to add new content. I need to focus on writing, research, grammar and spelling, dates and names, selecting and touching up photographs - not making sure that baden-north03.html links to baden-church02.html in all the right places.

I have a strong vision of how the site should work, but I lack the technical know-how to implement any of it, or handle the migration of a huge number of manually built pages to a standardized system. I need someone who knows about Content Management Systems to help me get things set up, or at least advise on how I can get going down the right road.

If you or someone you know is willing to lend some technical help in the name of the city's architecture, please contact me at builtstlouis@gmail.com. I'll see to it that any and all assistance is recognized on the site, and I will be hugely grateful.